At conhIT 2014 in Berlin, Siemens Healthcare presents products and solutions that help to network health data and provide interdisciplinary access to knowledge – to make hospital processes more efficient and improve quality of treatment.

For the i.s.h.med hospital information system (HIS), the medication solution package is available immediately, to help hospitals represent drug-based treatment fully digitally using predefined processes. A new element in the Soarian HIS is the "Critical Care" module for intensive care use. The exchange of data either within a single entity or between different service providers is at the heart of the Unified Information Management concept. This comprises scalable archiving and networking solutions that bundle and distribute non-standardised information and data from a range of different sources.

Each patient's chart is a key tool for doctors and caregivers in a hospital environment. It provides information on matters such as blood pressure, pulse rate and medication – in other words, the patient's overall condition. Charts are still usually written by hand, and are therefore prone to error and of only limited value. This is why Siemens supports hospitals on the way toward digital charts using its new HIS solutions.

A new package of solutions is available for i.s.h.med in Germany right now to help with medication. This package enables the drug treatment process that is displayed in the digital chart to be performed paperlessly. The processes involved are pre-defined within the i.s.h.med package of solutions, based on customer experiences. This simplifies implementation and helps structure the medication process efficiently: doctors can enter prescriptions in the HIS and the system will automatically generate work lists for the care staff; documentation for administering the drugs is also generated via the HIS.

The package also provides a connection to the drug catalog and the "Clinical Checking" tool from Dosing GmbH. This allows prescriptions to be checked for interactions or to ensure the correct doses, and to correct them as appropriate. This can help improve the safety of drug treatment in particular of older, multimorbid patients who are taking several forms of medication.

Compared to patients in the regular ward, charts in intensive care are much more complex, in view of the special requirements that apply there. In addition to the standard vital parameters, they include information on cardiac and respiratory function. The new "Critical Care" module in the Soarian HIS, available in numerous countries as of now, takes care of these requirements. Data from intensive care monitoring devices feeds automatically into the digital chart, which gives the care personnel a rapid overview of the patient's condition. Unlike dedicated departmental systems for intensive care, Soarian "Critical Care" is fully incorporated into the HIS. This means that information from intensive care can be viewed in the recovery or regular wards, depending on authorisation levels.

For instance, staff there can read – from their usual HIS user interface – what medications the patient has received and how the patient's vital parameters have changed, and thus draw conclusions for further treatment. The "Critical Care" module is also designed for comprehensive connection to medical devices in the hospital, and can also be used outside of the intensive care unit.

The intensive care module will be used in locations such as the Erasmus University Medical Center Rotterdam and the University Medical Center Groningen. A project assigned recently by both hospitals includes not only the implementation of an HIS, but also archiving and networking solutions, forming the basis for a future-proof IT strategy for both hospitals. It is thus an example of the Unified Information Management concept being presented by Siemens at conhIT.

It takes account of the changing demands of hospitals throughout Europe: considering the rapid growth in data volumes and a growing need for interdisciplinary cooperation, they are less interested in one-off solutions for special problems. Rather, they want an overall concept, one that will manage information in a range of formats and from a range of sources – images, laboratory results or physicians' reports – and make it available across all institutions and sectors. With Unified Information Management, Siemens combines archiving and networking solutions to healthcare IT strategies suitable for customer requirements. It uses Soarian Health Archive and the vendor-neutral multimedia archive syngo.share to archive and manage documents and images. Soarian Integrated Care and the IHE (Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise)-based 'sense' are available to ensure a targeted and secure exchange of data. The components of Unified Information Management that are used depend on specific customer requirements. The solution is so scalable and flexible that it can even lead to fully digital care processes.

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